The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus

standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards developing organization (SDO), or standards setting organization (SSO) is an organization whose primary function is developing, coordinating, promulgating, revising, amending, reissuing, interpr ...

for

geospatial Geographic data and information is defined in the ISO/TC 211 series of standards as data and information having an implicit or explicit association with a location relative to Earth (a geographic location or geographic position). It is also ca ...

content and

location-based services A location-based service (LBS) is a general term denoting software services which use geographic data and information to provide services or information to users. LBS can be used in a variety of contexts, such as health, indoor object search, ent ...

sensor web Sensor web is a type of sensor network that heavily utilizes the World Wide Web and is especially suited for environmental monitoring. OGC's ''Sensor Web Enablement'' (SWE) framework defines a suite of web service interfaces and communication pr ...

and Internet of Things, GIS data processing and

data sharing Data sharing is the practice of making data used for scholarly research available to other investigators. Many funding agencies, institutions, and publication venues have policies regarding data sharing because transparency and openness are consid ...

. It originated in 1994 and involves more than 500 commercial, governmental, nonprofit and research organizations in a consensus process encouraging development and implementation of open standards.

History

A predecessor organization, OGF, the Open

GRASS Poaceae () or Gramineae () is a large and nearly ubiquitous family of monocotyledonous flowering plants commonly known as grasses. It includes the cereal grasses, bamboos and the grasses of natural grassland and species cultivated in lawns a ...

Foundation, started in 1992. From 1994 to 2004 the organization also used the name Open GIS Consortium. The OGC website gives a detailed history of the OGC.

Standards

Most of the OGC standards depend on a generalized architecture captured in a set of documents collectively called the ''Abstract Specification'', which describes a basic data model for representing

geographic feature A feature (also called an object or entity), in the context of geography and geographic information science, is a discrete phenomenon that exists at a location in the space and scale of relevance to geography; that is, at or near the surface of E ...

s. Atop the Abstract Specification members have developed and continue to develop a growing number of specifications, or ''standards'' to serve specific needs for

interoperable Interoperability is a characteristic of a product or system to work with other products or systems. While the term was initially defined for information technology or systems engineering services to allow for information exchange, a broader def ...

location and geospatial technology, including GIS. GeoServer GeoNetwork with web app

The OGC standards baseline comprises more than 30 standards, including: * 3D Tiles – Designed for streaming and rendering massive 3D geospatial content such as Photogrammetry, 3D Buildings, BIM/CAD, Instanced Features, and Point Clouds. * CSW – Catalog Service for the Web: access to catalog information * GML – Geography Markup Language:

XML Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language and file format for storing, transmitting, and reconstructing arbitrary data. It defines a set of rules for encoding documents in a format that is both human-readable and machine-readable ...

-format for geographical information * GeoPackage – An open, standards-based, platform-independent, portable, self-describing, compact format for transferring geospatial information *

GeoSPARQL GeoSPARQL is a standard for representation and querying of geospatial linked data for the Semantic Web from the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC). The definition of a small ontology based on well-understood OGC standards is intended to provide a st ...

– Geographic SPARQL Protocol and RDF Query Language: representation and querying of geospatial data for the Semantic Web *

GeoXACML GeoXACML stands for ''Geospatial eXtensible Access Control Markup Language''. It defines a geo-specific extension to XACML Version 2.0, as it was ratified by OASIS standards organization A standards organization, standards body, standards devel ...

– Geospatial eXtensible Access Control Markup Language *

KML Keyhole Markup Language (KML) is an XML notation for expressing geographic annotation and visualization within two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers. KML was developed for use with Google Earth, which was originally named Key ...

–

Keyhole A lock is a mechanical or electronic fastening device that is released by a physical object (such as a key, keycard, fingerprint, RFID card, security token or coin), by supplying secret information (such as a number or letter permutation or pas ...

Markup Language:

-based language schema for expressing geographic annotation and visualization on existing (or future) Web-based, two-dimensional maps and three-dimensional Earth browsers *

Observations and Measurements Observations and Measurements (O&M) is an international standard which defines a conceptual schema encoding for observations, and for features involved in sampling when making observations. While the O&M standard was developed in the context of geog ...

OGC Reference Model The OGC Reference Model describes a framework for the ongoing work of the Open Geospatial Consortium The Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC), an international voluntary consensus standards organization for geospatial content and location-based se ...

– a complete set of

reference models Reference is a relationship between objects in which one object designates, or acts as a means by which to connect to or link to, another object. The first object in this relation is said to ''refer to'' the second object. It is called a ''name'' ...

* OLS – Open Location Service (OpenLS) * OGC Web Services Context Document defines the application state of an OGC Integrated Client * OWS – OGC Web Service Common * SOS – Sensor Observation Service *SPS – Sensor Planning Service *

SensorML SensorML is an approved Open Geospatial Consortium standar and an XML encoding for describing sensors and measurement processes. SensorML can be used to describe a wide range of sensors, including both dynamic and stationary platforms and both in- ...

– Sensor Model Language *

SensorThings API SensorThings API is an Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) standard providing an open and unified framework to interconnect IoT sensing devices, data, and applications over the Web. It is an open standard addressing the syntactic interoperabilit ...

- an open and unified framework to interconnect IoT devices, data, and applications over the Web. Currently a candidate standard waiting for votes. * SFS – Simple Features – SQL * SLD - Styled Layer Descriptor *

SRID A spatial reference system (SRS) or coordinate reference system (CRS) is a framework used to precisely measure locations on the surface of the Earth as coordinates. It is thus the application of the abstract mathematics of coordinate systems and ...

, an identification for spatial coordinate systems * WaterML – Information model for the representation of hydrological observation data * WCS – Web Coverage Service: provides access, subsetting, and processing on coverage objects * WCPS – Web Coverage Processing Service: provides a raster query language for ad-hoc processing and filtering on raster coverages * WFS – Web Feature Service: for retrieving or altering feature descriptions * WMS – Web Map Service: provides map images * WMTS – Web Map Tile Service: provides map image tiles * WPS – Web Processing Service: remote processing service * WTS – Web Terrain Service (WTS) The design of standards were originally built on the

HTTP The Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) is an application layer protocol in the Internet protocol suite model for distributed, collaborative, hypermedia information systems. HTTP is the foundation of data communication for the World Wide We ...

web services paradigm for message-based interactions in web-based systems, but meanwhile has been extended with a common approach for

SOAP Soap is a salt of a fatty acid used in a variety of cleansing and lubricating products. In a domestic setting, soaps are surfactants usually used for washing, bathing, and other types of housekeeping. In industrial settings, soaps are use ...

protocol and

WSDL The Web Services Description Language (WSDL ) is an XML-based interface description language that is used for describing the functionality offered by a web service. The acronym is also used for any specific WSDL description of a web service (also ...

bindings. Considerable progress has been made in defining Representational State Transfer (REST) web services, e.g., OGC

Organization structure

The OGC has several operational units:

Standards program (SP)

In the OGC Standards Program the Technical Committee and Planning Committee work in a formal consensus process to arrive at approved (or "adopted") OGC standards. Learn about the standards that have been approved so far, and see the lists of products that implement these standards.

Compliance Program (CP)

The OGC Compliance Program provides the resources, procedures, and policies for improving software implementations' compliance with OGC standards. The Compliance Program provides an online free testing facility, a process for certification and branding of compliant products, and community coordination. The Compliance Program also runs plugfests, which are short term events for increasing interoperability among vendors' products.

Community and Outreach Program (COP)

The OGC and its members offer resources to help technology developers and users take advantage of the OGC's open standards. Technical documents, training materials, test suites, reference implementations and other interoperability resources developed in OGC Interoperability Initiatives are available on our resources page. In addition, the OGC and its members support publications, workshops, seminars and conferences to help technology developers, integrators and procurement managers introduce OGC capabilities into their architectures.

Membership

The OGC offers membership options for industry, government, academic, research and not-for-profit organizations.

Collaboration

The OGC has a close relationship with

ISO/TC 211 ISO/TC 211 is a standard technical committee formed within ISO, tasked with covering the areas of digital geographic information (such as used by geographic information systems) and geomatics. It is responsible for preparation of a series of Inte ...

(Geographic Information/Geomatics). Volumes from the ISO 19100 series under development by this committee progressively replace the OGC abstract specification. Further, the OGC standards Web Map Service, GML, Web Feature Service,

, and Simple Features Access have become ISO standards. The OGC works with more than 20 international standards-bodies including

W3C The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...

, OASIS,

WfMC WFMC (730 AM) is an Urban Gospel radio station licensed to Goldsboro, North Carolina Goldsboro, originally Goldsborough, is a city and the county seat of Wayne County, North Carolina, United States. The population was 33,657 at the 2020 cens ...

, and the

IETF The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) is a standards organization for the Internet and is responsible for the technical standards that make up the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP). It has no formal membership roster or requirements and a ...

References

External links

* {{Authority control